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Dreams of self‑expression in Rusty Brown.
Dreams of self‑expression in Rusty Brown. Photograph: Chris Ware
Dreams of self‑expression in Rusty Brown. Photograph: Chris Ware

Rusty Brown by Chris Ware review – a treasure trove of invention

This article is more than 4 years old

With its awe-inspiring exploration of regret and ageing, anxiety and ennui, Ware’s latest graphic novel poses essential questions about the formation of character

Chris Ware’s latest book was almost 20 years in the making; some parts were written during the Clinton administration. It is a lovingly executed piece of work, the product of an implacable mind, deserving of sustained and repeated attention. If one feels any resistance to calling it a “novel”, it comes not from the presence of graphics – the term could be comfortably applied to Ware’s earlier Jimmy Corrigan, which won the Guardian first book award in 2001, and even his multi-permutational 2012 book-in-a-box Building Stories – but from the piecemeal narrative method. Even the moments of overlap between the book’s four sections convey the spirit of an in-joke or nudge. The overall result feels closer to a linked collection of stories, a treasure trove of insight and invention, rather than an organic whole.

It begins in Omaha, Nebraska, on a snowy weekday in 1975. The title character, a put-upon eight-year-old schoolboy convinced he is endowed with extraordinary powers of hearing, occupies our attention for the opening 100 pages. Then the baton is passed to his father, first encountered as a middle-aged teacher with an extremely downturned moustache, but represented in this section as a younger man desperate for success as a science fiction writer. The remaining chapters take us away from the Brown family, to record the lifelong travails of the school bully (Jordan Lint) and an anguished personal quest undertaken by one of Mr Brown’s colleagues (Joanne Cole).

Though Rusty reappears for a cameo, it isn’t clear why he justifies having his name on the cover, and the decision to abandon him is amply vindicated. The remaining narratives display a shared concern with regret and ageing, anxiety and ennui (there’s a lot of repetition and masturbation), the sense of lives being missed for a combination of factors, from parental neglect to racial intolerance. The book poses essential questions about the formation and hardening of character: what limits our chances of happiness or fulfilment? How do behavioural patterns form? And why are they so hard to break?

Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown. Photograph: Chris Ware

Ware’s literary project has been to move comics away from superhero mythology to the realm of the heroic everyday, on the model of Charles M Schulz’s Peanuts, but with a more self-conscious sense of artistry and ambition. As a writer-illustrator, he can seem greedy, even manic, in his desire to exploit the available resources. Every one of his frames – and a single page here finds space for 177 of them – is used to bring us closer to his people and their world. There’s nothing that he isn’t interested in trying to render at least once, from genitalia of various hues to snowflakes to every kind of living space. It’s as if he sees the essential challenge of graphic novels as being to invest the page with as much meaning and detail as humanly possible – and to prove his own contention, expressed in the issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly he edited, that the possible vocabulary of comics is “unlimited”.

One overt, if possibly superficial, debt is to cinema, starting with an opening credits cast list and using off-screen dialogue and cross-cutting, closeups and long shots, time-jumps and perspectival shifts. Ware displays a deeper allegiance to the impressionist urges of literary modernism. In a whimsical note on the dust jacket he declares that the section about Jordan Lint, which moves wrenchingly from cradle to grave, tries to approximate “the development of linguistic consciousness in graphically intuited form”. These pages make use of a dizzying and restlessly experimental range of devices and styles: from the blobs and blurs that represent how a newborn might construct his mother, to the blockish shapes and crude colours of toddlerhood, to the capital letters that express Jordan’s pubescent desire to forgo the identity bestowed by his parents (“I AM JASON”). Finally we are given upside-down images and disjointed, multicoloured letters reflecting the impressions of a dying man. It’s the comic artist’s equivalent of what Joyce sought to do in A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, trading up his language as Stephen graduates to adolescence and adulthood.

Ware’s sensibility is gloriously mixed. The extensive use of onomatopoeia feels equally reminiscent of the cat in Ulysses (“Mrkrgnao!”) and the dust-ups from Adam West-era Batman (“KAPOW!”). If the visual aesthetic at times recalls pop art, right down to the use of Lichtenstein’s trademark spotted-gauze effect, the compositions more frequently recall Edward Hopper. At just the moment his palette begins to feel a little pinched or crayonish – Tom Paulin once compared Ware’s style to the packaging of a Domestos bottle – he will use a flashback interlude to unleash a bounty of bright green. And though the characters speak a matter-of-fact, slightly affectless American idiom, Ware revels in exclamation marks, italicised syllables and meta-narrative interjections such as “Thirty minutes later” and “So” and even “Anyway”.

Living spaces … detail from Rusty Brown. Photograph: Chris Ware

Ware’s effects are never less than lucid: he is thinking all the time about impact and effect and comprehension, and it’s difficult for his reader to avoid doing the same, stopping at frequent intervals to register, with gratitude verging on awe, just how much one has been subliminally noting – the store of visual information in every frame. There’s only one moment of stagy exposition, when Joanne Cole, the school administrator who provides the focus for the final 90 pages, announces: “What a blustery night I picked for a musical recital” to the art teacher Mr Ware (an amusingly unflattering self-portrait of the author as a Lichtenstein pasticheur and theory-spouting poseur).

While Ware struggles to achieve a cumulative dramatic effect, the variety of texture and perspective contributes to a single emotional tone, which might be characterised as zany pathos. Rusty Brown is a human document of rare richness – infinitely sad, intimately attuned to desolation and disappointment, but never closed to the possibility of a breakthrough, of someone transcending a dead-end, sad-sack fate. Though pain is germinal, love and hope exist. Ware has argued that the comic-book writer’s “feeling of how they see the world” shouldn’t be confined to the “look” of their art, and with this impassioned and ineffable piece of work, he has realised that aim.

Rusty Brown by Chris Ware is published by Cape (£25). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.

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